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Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#421

Post by coldcode »

oraguy wrote: post #18

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…

Sounds like working on batch apps on mainframes in the 70's, one compile/run cycle a day, next morning get a 1 foot high printed stack of core dump.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#422

Post by clausok »

I worked on an Excel\vba swat team at an investment bank. Whenever someone in the various business units got themselves into more trouble than they could handle with an Excel model, we'd try to set things right. We saw a lot of wonderfully creative vba code from industrious programming beginners (or, as we liked to call them, "Macro Recording Cowboys". The most amusing I saw was a model where the vba code used a Greek mythology variable naming convention:

Dim Hermes As String, Artemis As Long, Odin As Range

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#423

Post by Oren-T »

oraguy wrote: post #18

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…

Now pick almost any other category-leading software product and you will find a similar situation.

The category-leading product is probably from one of the earliest companies in the field, if not the first. They have the oldest and cruftiest code - and the manpower to somehow keep it working. It is definitely not the fastest and definitely not the most stable. But they do have the resources to make sure it supports all the third party integrations and features important for the big customers.

I have encountered exactly this same situation on several different fields and categories.

At at time when I was a complete open source fanatic in the early 2000s it suddenly made me realize how Microsoft actually had much better quality software than most big proprietary software vendors.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#424

Post by HauntedMidget »

oraguy wrote: post #18

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…

Thank you. I had a really rough day caused by the project I inherited. Doesn't seem so bad in comparison now.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#425

Post by alexeiz »

oraguy wrote: post #291
Maro wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good exercise to imagine how the job would be sold. Things like this would definitely not come up in the interview process, instead they would sell you on "you get to work on a cutting-edge db kernel that is running most of the Fortune 100s" or sth like that, which is true (!), but doesn't describe the day to day. The best way to guess this is to extrapolate from the interview questions. If they ask you a lot…

On the contrary, the interview was an ordinary one. The screening round consisted of very basic fizzbuzz type coding ability checks: Reversing a linked list, finding duplicates in a list, etc. Further rounds of interviews covered data structure problems (trees, hashtables, etc.), design problems, scalability problems, etc. It was just like any other interview for software engineering role.

"Well, your interviews went quite well. Now the final question: what would you do if you start losing your mind?"

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#426

Post by AtlasBarfed »

oraguy wrote: post #18

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…

You've violated the terms of service of Oracle Database by insinuating the codebase quality is in any way not superior to any and all competitors. No benchmarks or comparisons may be performed on the Oracle Database Product under threat of grave bodily harm at the discretion of our very depraved CEO.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#427

Post by maksimum »

knuffced wrote: post #384
nathan_f77 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is absolutely insane. I can't even begin to imagine the complexity of that codebase. I thought my Rails test suite was slow because it takes 4 minutes. If I wrote it in C or C++ it would probably be 10 seconds. I can't imagine a C/C++ application where the test suite takes 20-30 hours on a test farm with 100-200 servers. And if you can break 100-1000 tests with a single change, it doesn't like things are very mo…

Tests in C/C++ run shockingly fast. I ported an application from Ruby to C++ and the tests ran in well under a second when it was taking 10+ seconds in Ruby. Granted because of C++'s type system there were fewer tests, but it was fast enough that I kept thinking something was wrong.

Are you including the time to build/link the tests? This is especially true if you have a bunch of dependencies. Last time I worked on C++ tests most of my time was spent on getting the tests to link quickly. Managed to get it from 25 minutes to 1 minute. But I'd rather have spent that time actually writing more test cases, even if they took 10s to run.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#428

Post by melenaos »

dejv wrote: post #168

I am maintaining one application in construction industry space. That application was created 25 years ago by construction worker that never wrote single line of code before, but because he caused a lot of problems on construction site they give him Programming 101 book and let him build it. 15 years later the app was close to half milion lines long of huge bowl of spaghetti code. Only comments in whole codebase were…

I think you won! I had similar experience with my first professional job, a cad cam that is solving building structures for antisysmic regulations. Every developed had his own lib, duplicated code with different bugs on each lib, no comments, every screen was build from copy paste code of other screen and no tests at all. Undercovered bugs was out there for many years without any way of knowing and special sleep functions producing intentionally slow code.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#429

Post by hjek »

neya wrote: post #232

A while ago, I was tasked with maintaining production code written in R by an enthusiastic junior developer. He loved R so much that it blinded his ability to use the right tool for the job. Instead, he wrote web applications in R, instead of Python or Ruby, which my company had many developers who had expertise in, and eventually handed it over to to me. He even persuaded our bosses to invest into R Studio Server an…

> In addition, the same name would refer to different things, eg. `abc` and `Abc` and `a_bc` would mean totally different things.

That's not too unusual. In Java `Camel` would usually be a class and `camel` an object, and in Prolog `Camel` is a variable wheras `camel` is an atom. Not sure about R though..?

> And stuff that could be written in a simple Sinatra or Flask application were written in R Shiny.

I don't know R Shiny, but the examples looks neat and simple.[0] Are you sure this is not just a case of "I don't like X" rather than the code being bad?

[0]: https://shiny.rstudio.com/articles/basics.html

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#430

Post by superhuzza »

ijuhoor wrote: post #350
voldacar wrote: post #250

As a budding programmer (hobbyist), what can I do not to fall into the mistakes others talk about in the comments? Is there any particular set of mental habits that could lessen the chance of spaghetti occurring, or is it just a matter of when rather than if?

All these comments are good. Also ALWAYS watch out for 'Quick Win': When you do something quick and dirty, mark it up for 'refactoring' (i.e. Tech Debt). When your list of quick and dirty builds up, go and clean it. Do not accumulate tech debt, try to keep it low otherwise you will pay full price later (examples up here). Another great tip that saved me from tons of refactoring: "The wrong abstraction is worse code d…

You don't just pay full price on technical debt, you pay it back with interest!
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